13 family conversations from before, during, and after a graveside service

I. With Siblings in a Sibling-Only Chat Separate from the One with Parents and Partners

We process the news together (I’m not the one to start the conversation but glad for the sibling who did). It’s not a deep processing, but I’m not sure we would have done this much even a few years ago. We plan to send flowers to the widow, decide who’s going to write the note, and settle up over Venmo. We coordinate flights and talk about travel logistics, especially while our parents are waylaid with a surprise surgery that is making a hard week even harder. We talk about how other family members are doing. It shows that we’re all well into adulthood now, and that sometimes we even act like it.

II. With Some Family Members Over FaceTime, As We’re Coordinating Travel

Spouse and I share how kiddo is sad about missing the deceased but that she has expressed a feeling that he is present with her during those moments. Sharing this has the desired effect in the conversation: bringing comfort to the family members who find it theologically significant. We have a considerably less theological worldview, though, and we wonder how to validate kiddo’s experience within the framework of how we do things in our home. It’s a reminder that we’ve made a lot of religion-related changes in our family since kiddo was born, and that we’re still figuring out our new ways of seeing things.

III. With Distant Relatives in the Airport, Who Had Been on my Flight Before We All Got Deplaned Because of a Maintenance Issue, and Are Now Waiting with Me for the Replacement Plane

I apologize for almost beaning one of them with my suitcase while getting it out of the overhead bin back on the plane. The truth is that I didn’t recognize him at first, and it takes a few minutes and a couple of passing references before I even remember the other’s name. I don’t see anyone from this side of the family very often, and especially not relatives this distant. It’s an instant connection, though: we swap stories, and I’m glad for mutually supportive extended families. I’d forgotten that one of them had done his Mormon missionary service in the same part of the world I had, so that comes up, but it’s usually not worth the hassle or potential awkwardness to advertise my immediate family’s religion-related changes in a broader family for whom Mormonism makes up a lot of the connective tissue. As complicated as my mission memories have become, I have some that remain genuinely positive, and it doesn’t feel misleading to stick to those.

IV: With a Relative Whose Exact Degree of “Government Can’t Tell Me What To Do” is Not Something I Paid Attention to When Younger and is Hard to Pin Down Now

Reminding him that I do social media research gets him asking about free speech issues, Section 230, and that sort of thing. I always wish I were better read on this, but I remind myself that I follow this more closely than most people do (even—especially?—people with stronger opinions than mine) and share what I usually teach my students: These issues are super complex; despite some earlier skepticism, I’ve come around on Section 230 being A Good Thing; there are plenty of things protected by the First Amendment that he doesn’t want in his replies; and content moderation is more often a question of business strategy (for better and for worse) than actual free speech issues. I think I do okay, but I’m also not trying to convince him any further than “moderation is not the bogeyman Jim Jordan makes it to be.”

V: With My Siblings and Parents, Over a Lunch Provided by the Local Mormon Congregation

We’re eating in the “cultural hall” (Mormonspeak for a church building’s gym, which are famously also used for funeral events, wedding receptions, dances, and so many other things), and my Dad points to the basketball hoop where he first pulled off a slam dunk. We ask him how much time he spent dribbling and shooting here, and he tells us more stories. My Dad’s faith stuck with me a lot longer than his love for basketball ever did, and our other conversations are a reminder that Mormonism is a deep part of me and that I don’t really mind that. This remains true even though simply arguing for a more grace-oriented and less perfectionist approach to Christianity (hardly the least heretical of my views) was already enough to receive some side-eye the last time I attended church in this building. We debate whether the glutinous casserole served up alongside our ham is properly called “Mormon potatoes” or “funeral potatoes,” and we gobble down familiar rolls that one sibling (even further removed from Mormonism than I am) later describes as one of the religion’s greatest contributions to the world.

VI: With A Very Distant Relative Whom I Don’t Recall Ever Meeting

I am instructed that later in the day, I should gather up my brothers (is my sister off the hook? also, is this guy going to be open to a conversation about gender not being a binary and where all six of us land on a more inclusive spectrum?) so that he can tell us a story about his time in Vietnam. It’s not a happy story, I’m told, but it will teach us about why he loves our country so much and how much God loves us. He regrets not having known us while we were younger and wants to make up for lost time. He assures us that even though “they don’t let you give hugs anymore in church,” the young women in his congregation still come up every Sunday to greet him with a hug. For all of our adulthood, we siblings are still on the young end of this family gathering, and someone’s eager to mentor us.

VII: With My Siblings, Pretty Shortly After Conversation VI

We discuss strategies for getting each other out of any conversations we don’t want to be in throughout the day. Someone says that we’ve been given explicit permission to do this from the kind of family member whom we might have expected to encourage us to be patient and polite, and that emboldens us. I volunteer as tribute in case it comes down to it, some siblings make it clear that they don’t want to have someone else process trauma at them while we’re already at a funeral, and we agree to split up and rescue each other as needed.

VIII: With my Brother, Uncle, and Uncle’s Girlfriend, in the Car on the Way to the Cemetery

I ask one data science question while we talk about the grad program my brother is in. I barely know what I’m asking about—I teach an intro to data science class, but three of my siblings work with stats and programming way more than I do—but the exchange impresses my uncle that his nephews know a few things. The ML classification that my brother was talking about was sports-related, though, and once everyone else starts focusing on that, I have nothing to say, because I just don’t sportsball.

IX: With Myself, During the Graveside Service

How is someone trying to embrace nonviolence supposed to feel at a military cemetery? I think I can separate my increasingly negative feelings about the U.S. military from a family member who served in that military and whose death I am mourning, but is that really possible? Did that employee (volunteer?) from the cemetery who’s leading the service really just refer to “the Civil War, or the War Between the States, begun by the North”? Is that as Confederate-apologist as it sounds, and if so, what the hell? Why am I getting distracted by all of this instead of thinking about the deceased? Does this make me a bad person?

X: With My Youngest Cousins, As We Semi-Awkwardly Cross Paths a Couple of Times During the Afternoon

This is not really a conversation, because I can’t remember who’s who and am too embarrassed to ask anyone. All the other cousins grew up near each other and gathered for monthly dinners and holidays. We lived “way out in Kentucky” and saw folks once a year—if we were lucky. I’m the oldest child of an oldest child, and the gap between me and the youngest children of the younger children is enough that we just didn’t bond even when we did spend time together. I don’t regret not being on Facebook (anymore) or Instagram (ever), but I wonder if I’d know them better if I were.

XI: With My Very Distant Relative who has a Story to Tell, as My Sibling is Flashing me a Heart Sign for Giving Them an Out Before the Story Starts

It’s a genuinely moving story, even if I have not asked to hear it. I don’t draw the same patriotic, miraculous, conclusions as the storyteller does—war is hell, etc., and the reason I try to distinguish individual soldiers from the military is because of how often those soldiers are obviously also the victims of their own country’s warmongering—but I’m glad to have heard it in a way that I didn’t expect. A brother notices the conversarion and comes to give me an out, but we’re almost done, and I figure if he’s told the story once, he may not try to corner anyone else. Indeed, he encourages me to charge my siblings $5/head to hear the story, so I laugh and say I’ll think about it.

XII: With Siblings and Cousins, Carefully Because Our Parents Are Sometimes in Earshot, and Some of What We Say May Sound Like Criticism Even if That’s Not What We’re Trying to Do

We talk about how anxious we are, and how anxious our kids are, and how we want to teach our kids to deal with their anxiety early on so that they don’t wait until their 30s to learn healthy coping mechanisms. We talk about how much the world sucks—especially for not-cis-males—and about how our kids are already picking up on the suckiness and wonder how to teach them about those things without just making them more anxious. I glance at cousins’ ears, comparing piercings against Mormon norms (0/ear/male, 1/ear/female, and there isn’t anyone who falls outside those categories), and wonder how many of them have also made religion-related changes in their family. I know one is weighing those changes now, and in a separate conversation, we talk more about parenting: how a relative on the other side of my family corrects kiddo when she uses my sibling’s pronouns, how I’m not sure who’s going to ascribe theological significance to kiddo’s new tarot deck or how to respond to that. In hindsight, I talk too much while I should be listening.

XIII: While At the Deceased’s House, to Spend Time with His Widow, Who Wants Us to Lay Claim to Some of His Belongings as Mementos

We tell stories of briefly lost children—including when I was four and wandered out of a bookstore in what had then-recently been the DDR, and it took deceased to realize I might be at the police station instead of even further down the street—and for the first time I hear that kind of story not as the lost child but as the frantic parent, and wow does that hit differently. We discuss which books, or clothes, or knicknacks should go home with whom. My cousin puts on a hat and for the next 15 minutes, everyone is compelled (as if by magic) to tell him how much it suits him. No one claims the Kama Sutra or older-than-the-deceased sex manual that are surprising/awkward/hilarious to find on a bookshelf, but I talk to my brother about which John le Carré novels to try (and snag a couple myself). The deceased was a gifted photographer: Prints are too hard to bring home in suitcases, but he had folders and folders of photos on his laptop, and some people figure out whose Google Drive has space and start uploading. One sibling goes through photography equipment, trying to tell the widow how much they’re worth (we’re already on the lookout for hidden cash caches because the widow’s finances aren’t in great shape) and only hearing back “but he would want you to have them.” We work out a compromise, and then chat sleepily in the living room as the camera bag gets packed back up and we talk about flights home the next morning.

• macro
• Relationships
• funerals
• Mormonism
• Latter-day Saint missionaries
• content moderation
• Section 230
• free speech
• Jim Jordan
• John Le Carré
• faith transition